It would be nice if Monzo didn’t put all it’s eggs in one basket - any chance of an open platform for open banking? (I know Amazon is hardly ‘open’, but being free to choose your master is a step in the right direction…)
Amazon phones exist?
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Do they? It’s not quite my point - freedom from Google Play was my point.
You could sideload if you were really that bothered.
Will it work sideloaded without Google? I don’t think so.
I also don’t think it will work without Google framework.
But, it would be nice if it did…
From what I’ve seen I think Google SDKs etc are too intergrated and they have no intention of changing.
But yes it would be for sure, plus get away from all the Facebook ones also.
You can download the apk from plenty of apk mirror sites. Obviously the downside being you don’t know what you’re really installing and it won’t update itself.
Monzo could probably host an official apk, I guess 
Still Android so still Google though. I guess a Progressive Web App would be cool but you’d still need to use a supported browser on a supported phone.
Can you explain to those who aren’t that au fait with such things, what you mean by an ‘open platform’?
Where would you anticipate Monzo running other than Android or iOS?? (or am I totally missing the point??)
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Might want it on a Nokia 3310 
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At the moment we do use Google Play Services, so unfortunately distributing and maintaining on other Android-based operating systems that don’t use Google’s frameworks isn’t possible. It’s a lot of work that we don’t have the resources for, and that wouldn’t be of benefit to a significant amount of people, especially since Amazon don’t make phones themselves. The target market would really only be Amazon tablets (and we don’t officially support tablets) or people that have flashed modified Google-free versions of Android onto their phones, which is a very small amount of people.
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Well, Android without the Google gubbins would be open in a way that the Google gubbins ain’t - which is why I suggested Amazon Appstore, not that I’m a fan of Amazon (far from it). If Monzo could install from the Amazon Appstore, then it could install on a vanilla (AOSP) Android (I guess).
Another alternative would be if Monzo ran in a standard Web browser - which would free it from both Apple and Google lock-ins.
Monzo talks about being open source:
https://monzo.com/blog/2016/09/19/building-a-modern-bank-backend/ [https://monzo.com/blog/2016/09/19/building-a-modern-bank-backend/]
but then chooses only closed platforms to run on…
The phone I would like Monzo to run on, but which it doesn’t is here (btw, it’s not a Nokia):
https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/ [https://puri.sm/products/librem-5/]
It’s really all a question of trust and which trust model you believe in - do you trust huge multinationals like Apple, Google and Microsoft to look after you or do you trust individuals able to browse the code and who scream and shout when they see something they don’t like?
At the moment Monzo seems to be looking both ways with a foot in each camp - which is problematic whichever trust model you choose.
Yes.
No, because they’re not bound by anything apart from their own course of judgment and have not earns the trust that larger companies have earned.
All in all, I believe monzo is doing the right thing by being on the Apple App Store and the Play store.
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I don’t think monzo would work on that phone anyway because it only has support for html5 apps and monzo isn’t.
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Not sure why it has to be a binary choice
For example Google’s ClusterFuzz and Project Zero are both very positive contributions to software security, both open source and otherwise. Witness this just yesterday:
https://twitter.com/natashenka/status/1180211208999198720?s=20
On the flip side, that individual looking at the code could be a hacker or scammer
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I thought the whole point of Monzo’s code being open was just so hackers could look at the code, hack it about, so Monzo would benefit from their input and they would benefit from having a bank that worked:
?
How much trust has Microsoft and Google earned? (Perhaps Apple is more trusted.) Perhaps Microsoft and Google have earnt lots of trust?
No, but my suggestion was that it does and is:
That way, you kill both the desktop and lock-in birds with one stone…
Which is the platform I use lol
I was weighing up your closed multinationals vs screaming individuals point
I have no problem with code being open, but I don’t buy into there being any magic there
The effort needs to go in either way and it is more likely to be there if properly funded - see the Linux contributors, for example, with very few of them pottering about in their sheds for free
I prefer screaming Google Project Zero to misbehaving individual
Does the Amazon App Store work on that phone? It doesn’t appear to be an Android-based OS.